Alex Burke - Copenhagen

My port of entry into Europe was Berlin, where we stayed in the apartment of a friend of Zana's, my traveling partner through India. She had been living and studying in Berlin for a year and had slipped back to Australia leaving us the debris of her life there, and the lofty room she lived in, the bed that smelled of someone gone, and the comfort of having a washing machine, a kitchen and a space to ourselves.

A wonderful space to recover in! My post-India ailments did nothing to prevent me from registering Berlin's vibrancy and dynamism, the energy in the streets on the faces of its residents cycling below my window. My internal and physical being was in total re-construction mode, where I had to put myself together from the way India ripped at the layers of every level of my being and body. I left Berlin to Copenhagen knowing I would return.

Alex Burke and I met at the restaurant I worked at in Sydney for 3 years and we became partners in crime, attracted to her generous spirit, constant sense of humor, and love of wining and dining.
In Copenhagen she works for a Danish film distributor and lives in a cosy old apartment close to everything, full of girls who are drawn by her magnetism to share her bed, her floor and her couch. A little family of ladies in the 'West-end' all sharing space, patience, wine and days, revolving like planets with different axis', around Alex and her fay and vague line of living, her smooth and fluid lifestyle, which however disorganized it seems from the outside, somehow functions and survives in new countries, new jobs, demanding situations, and all sorts of social echalons. This ability is highly endearing and her method of survival creates an air of Mother-Hen-ism that offers the famous Burke-Hug and endless generosity. Copenhagen was a platter of ladies and friendly wine-bars, long mornings spent relaxing (well earned and needed after my Indian Adventures) and strolling the city, getting a little high off Christiania, Copenhagen's own Nimbin-style commune right in the centre of the city, watching the local talent of freaks and lovers and European men, laying lake-side. In full ease did we roll the week over in CPH with the west-end girls, and had the leisurely rhythm of home to get comfortable in ourselves again, recover to our full selves after the debilitating experience of Berlin previously, where I was out of action in recovery mode for the whole week. Thanks to Alex and her nest, I'm now off to Paris alone, and feeling fully returned to myself.